On the Edge

Marathon runner Bruce Dern, banned from the sport 20 years earlier for violating his amateur status, tries for a comeback in a grueling west-coast race. Writer-director Rob Nilsson (Northern Lights) has embroidered this sweat jerker with the standard melodramatic subplots (Dern is also running to earn the respect of his father, a retired labor organizer played by real-life radical Bill Bailey), and as authentic as the running sequences seem, they aren't enough to overcome the artificiality that invades this independent project from every other direction. With John Marley and Jim Haynie.
ByDave Kehr